SOUTHERN California is in the grip of drought. In Los Angeles
last week, friends pleaded with me to work a paranormal miracle
on their dry atmosphere, where barely 25 per cent of the usual
rain has fallen in the past 12 months.
The only solution I could offer was flippant: stage a Grand
Slam tennis tournament.
''In London,'' I said, ''we guarantee a wet summer by holding
Wimbledon. As soon as the racquet covers come off, the ground
covers have to go on.''

If only it were that easy. Britain, where the worst effect
of a dry-up is never more than a temporary ban on garden sprinklers
and car washes, can not imagine the misery caused by real,
bone-dry water shortages.

California's fiery drought, which has seen blazes run out
of control across 75,000 acres and reduced many rural communities
to subsisting on bucketfuls pulled from wells, is mirrored
in southern Africa: millions face disease and starvation following
another crop failure.

In Israel, which has seen six years of devastating drought
in the past decade, some analysts fear total war with the
Arab states will finally be provoked not by the Palestinian
crisis but by water shortages.

I believe a paranormal solution does exist. But it is so
extraordinary, based on technology that is so eerily unsettling,
that governments will almost certainly prefer to see entire
communities suffer untold hardship rather than admit the reality
of this heretic science.

Its name is 'orgone biophysics'. The methods that underpin
orgone research are so completely at odds with conventional
science that, to admit the validity of the techniques, society
must sweep aside many of its cherished beliefs about what
makes the cosmos tick.

For me, that's no tough call. My misgivings are well-aired:
I distrust the claims of scientists that cold, unemotional
logic can unravel the mysteries of the cosmos.

But for the majority of Westerners, science has become a
religion, and its central precepts are the gobbledegook of
formulae: e=Mc2 is both a mathematical statement and a mantra.

Small wonder that the latest book by James DeMeo, director
of research at the Orgone Biophysical Research Lab in Ashland,
Oregon, is called Heretic's Notebook. DeMeo is an evangelist
not only for orgone methodology but for the end of droughts.

His team has developed 'cloudbusters', which focus on congested
negative energy in the atmosphere and dissipate it, allowing
rain to fall.

The work is urgent, he insists: ''On a global basis, droughts
and desert spreading have significantly increased over the
last 100 years.

''New desert lands are today being created at an alarming
pace, with around 60,000 to 70,000 square kilometres of additional
new desert each year.''

In November 1991, when the Sea of Galilee had fallen to an
all-time low, DeMeo took his cloudbuster team to Kfar Blum
in north-east Israel.

A second machine was set up in Crete, and DeMeo hoped to
combine the effects from both to bring desperately needed
rain to the Holy Land.

Two weeks of frantic activity followed, as the Israeli cloudbuster,
dubbed Sabra, was shifted from Kfar Blum to Tiberius, Tel
Aviv and the Ein Gedi on the Dead Sea.

Heavy winds set in as the fog and stratus swirled, but the
waters did not break until November 27, when a deluge began
which broke 50-year records.

The West Bank and Jordan saw rainfall up to four times heavier
than average, and thick snow fell in Turkey and Lebanon.

''The local populations in most cases celebrated the arrival
of these storms, and endured the inconveniences and disruptions
to daily life without complaint,'' DeMeo notes.

''Previously bone-dry river beds filled quickly and overflowed
onto major roads - traffic often came to a standstill for
hours.

Additional difficulties also occurred in a few areas when
power lines were knocked down by heavy winds or accumulated
snow, leaving many persons without power, sometimes for days.''

Because of these side-effects, and because also the cloudbusters
can be dangerous to inexperienced operators, DeMeo is reluctant
to explain exactly how to build or use one.

He warns of instances where novices have strayed into the
discharge fields, where negative energy is emitted - cancers
and even paralysis have resulted, he claims on his website
at www.orgonelab.org

The most important factor concerns the moral fitness of the
operators, something which would horrify any scientist who
regards personal morality as an irrelevance in the lab.

Cloudbusters work effectively only when constructed and run
by people who have rid themselves of anger and greed, who
are capable of loving and supportive relationships with adults
and children, who respect animals and who have healthy sex
lives.

These are the precepts laid down by the discoverer of orgone
energy, an Austrian medic named Wilhelm Reich, who fled the
Nazis only to encounter bitter prejudice in the US.

He died in prison in 1957 after the Food and Drug Administration
declared his theories fraudulent and ordered his writings
to be burned.

Originally a Freudian, he believed that misdirected sexual
energy was at the root of all ill health as well as dysfunctional
societies.

Sexual theories, burned books, the rejection of conventional
science, mysterious machines and the manipulation of energy
fields - there's enough there to deter just about everyone.

So why write about it? Only this - it appears to work. And
on a planet burning up with drought and hatred, that is reason
enough.

Unorthodox
EncountersSoul-baring, disturbing, mind- expanding, sometimes
funny and often bursting with chutzpah, the collected thoughts,
writings and experiences of the world's most famous paranormalist
are compulsive reading.

Psychic
and the Rabbi"The two men are clearly close and intimate
friends, and through their exchanges we discover our own humanity".

URI
GELLER LECTURING TO AMERICAN SENATORS Senator
Pete Domenici, Former Senator Alan Cranston CA)(deceased), Senator
Fritz Hollings (So. Carolina). Lower picture: Uri with Vice
President Al Gore, Yuli M. Vorontsov, First Deputy Foreign Minister
of the Soviet Union and Anthony Lake (then National Security
advisor, later head of the CIA), and Senator Claiborne Pell,
Chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Uri's
task was to mentally bombard Yuli Vorontsov and the group at
the Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty Negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland,
to sign the nuclear treaty, which they did.